For the last couple of months, many bloggers (especially tech bloggers) experienced a sudden decline in their Cost Per Click (CPC). I often encounter lots of people asking me how to improve their CPC, but the reality is that I am myself confused and fail to deliver a satisfactory answer to them. So, around a month ago I decided to investigate this troublesome situation and find out the exact problems Asian Bloggers are facing with Google Adsense.

Why LOW CPC ads for Asian AdSense Publishers?

First, I opened up Google Keywords Tools and searched for the exact phrase “Blogging Tips” for USA, which showed me an average CPC of Rs. 84.3 . Upon doing the same search with country filter selected for India (An Asian country), I found the CPC to be as low as Rs. 17. It was a shocking difference which means that publishers getting Indian Ads for the keywords had the chance of getting almost 67 INR less each click. Multiply it by 100 and you are 6700 INR short, that too for this single keyword. I also found greater margins on other keywords. Then I asked myself this question, “Why is there such a difference?”

I finally found my answer that was lying all over myself. According to a study, Indians spend 43 Percent less money online than people from USA. Here I am not only taking about average consumers, bloggers, web-masters but also online marketing budgets of small and large business. Multi-National companies spend 30-40 percent less on online, and Inbound marketing in India compared to their branches in other countries. This lack of advertiser interest and non-awareness of the power of social media marketing is the main culprit behind the lower CPC in our country.

Here I’m performing Keyword research using Google Adwords tool, and for the same Keyword I’m targeting two different countries “U.S” and “India”, and you can notice the difference in Approx. CPC cost.

Blogging Tips Keyword CPC for USA

Blogging Tips Keyword CPC for India

Free Stuff and Purchasing power = low CPC:

Now I asked myself another question. Why do companies spend less here? We are the world’s third largest Internet consumer yet there are countries like Russia, UK, Australia paying better CPC’s with lots of new online advertiser pouring in every day. Upon doing some research, I found that Indians have a mentality of getting everything for free online.

We opt for the most number of the contest, sweepstakes, free hosting services, etc. in the world. Therefore, there is not much scope of converting visitors into leads and eventually customers out there. This is the primary reason our CPC’s are so low. Companies do not mind spending million more in Adsense Advertising when they know they have a good ROI (Return of Investment).

The solution to this demanding problem is nothing but awareness. We as bloggers must promote and write about the power of Social Media, Internet Marketing and how it can be used to convert visitors higher compared to traditional media like TV or Newspaper.

People need new, easier and safer methods and assurances for doing online payment. Banks need to be flexible with services like PayPal so that more customers can opt in for their service. Until then, we as bloggers will struggle to find a sweet, reliable spot in the Indian Adsense Market.

Alternatively, if you are relying on Adsense income, you should start targeting U.S based organic traffic and if are using high CPC words along with decent U.S traffic, you can expect more money/click on your AdSense ads. Another thing that you can do is pick that niche, where you can expect more buying capacity. For example, an age group between 18-24 in India will have less purchasing power, where as an age group of 25-40 will have more purchasing power.

You can also try SEMRUSh free coupon, and get one free account and get a list of high CPC keywords for your niche. Now, work on writing killer articles targeting those keywords and try to rank as high as you could. This may be time-consuming, but by the end if you manage to rank at the top for any high CPC keyword, with clever ad placement, you can make huge money from Adsense. Anyways, like this there are many tricks that we can apply to increase AdSense income, but for now let’s stick to our topic for discussion here.

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I am a graphics designer and i started blogging cause i never liked the conventional engineering degree and 9-5 job life. I have failed a number of times and tried again and again. With my latest blog website www.webplanetfreaks.weebly.com i get a decent traffic of 200 guys a day but what keeps me happy is that i halp many newbies falling for scam, preventing them with a msitake i made.

COMMENTs ( 30 )

I have an ansense account make in Mexico, but I get 100% of the visitors from USA. My EPC is only $0.10 for the exact same keyword that another adsense account made in USA makes $1 EPC. Both sites get the same traffic from USA, but why does the account made in Mexico (with USA traffic) generates much lower EPC?

Hello I made only $12 from 23000 impressions with 170 clicks and $0.70 cpc for indian traffic within a week. Is this invalid activity or Adsense doesn’t pay good for Indian traffic. However I made $38 from only 12000 impressions and 90 click with $0.41 cpc for USA traffic.

Apart from the online spending capacity of india there is also one factor which rahul forgot to mention is that,every new blogger who lands in this world dreams to become the next mashable hit..but and in hunt of contents they just copy from other same niche blogs or websites and post them on their blog ,which is completely unethical.
I created cppforum.net with a mind set to help those people who face problem in understanding C++ with very well organised blog structure that one can find every topic easily. And here on shoutmeloud harsh have also managed his blog so well and thats the key..cause you don’t read the same shit again and again just because its displayed differently .and that’s the reason that some blog have very high impressions but low CTR cause visitors come and go cause they know they have already read it before..
So I request bloggers to keep their blog genuine and keep original contents. On my blog the impressions are not in million or say not even in 4 figure a day but my blog CTR is much higher than what I see others call it fortune CTR.
Conclusion be original. .
Harsh thanks for the shoutmeloud I learn alot from your blog.

The reason given for low CPC makes perfect sense. Hence my doubt regarding low CPC for India is cleared with this article. I have another doubt that I experience low CPC for US, UK too for one day and its back to normal(high) another day. What might be the reason for that?

Also, I feel that Google caps revenue based on factors like site rank etc. The reason I say this is because when I get more income in first half of the day then there is no or very less income in second half on the other hand when there is no reveneue in first half then it is made up in the second half. Hardly I have seen my adsense account earn during the whole day. Any comments on this will be appreciated.
Thanks!

To all the webmasters who are worried about building websites for Indian websites vs US audiences, I would like to give a small observation from my own experience. I have gone through this situation of Indian vs Western traffic dilemma around 4-5 years ago and went on to concentrate on mainly Western traffic and built websites to cater to the US/Europe/English audience. But with time I have realized that you must build sites which “interest you” and not sites only keeping in mind the CPC or traffic. Because unless you are genuinely interested in the website topic, you would not able to sustain the quality of content in the website for long and if you do not do so, it will lead to downfall of the website in the long run. And if you are not genuinely interested in the niche, you would not update it that often and the quality of articles or content might not be upto the mark. So, it will be a loss-loss situation in any case. But if you are genuinely interested and know well even in topics related to India, build websites on those as you would end up delivering quality content which will interest your readers and would result in higher volume of traffic and thereby higher revenue in the long run. So, work on the content first and revenue would automatically follow. At the same time, be a bit smart too and “diversify”. Never put all your apples in one basket. :)

Hey Rahul you are right we should also see the buying capacity of the audience of a niche before selecting it but we should not ignore our passion while selecting a niche; if we enjoy a niche we should go for it either it bring organic traffic from US or from any poor country because eventually you will succeed in it if you really enjoy your niche.

So! It doesn’t t matter the blogger is in India or in US its the visitor who matters, If you build a US based visitors then there is a chance to get more out of every click, Am I right?
My question- We Indians opt for check in (Rs) as a currency; does it effect our earnings.

so how should be the things done… i means if we go with high cpc there is less chance to score better in seo as thigh cpc have high compitition … where as if we go on low cpc then we can score better but with less payouts … so can any one please tell me how to maintain the balance with cpc and seo …

and how should be the ad placements on the website does that matters……?

Yes its true that there is a huge difference in CPC value for India and US!! And I was surprised to note that all my keywords were having cpc less than 34 cents when location was set India, but they shoots up to even $20 when location was set as US.

My only question is that, if we want to target US traffic, do we need to get our hosting also done in US and not in India? As Google search results changes drastically location wise and preference is given to local hosts in a country while ranking in search results.

I came to this article from Google while searching for the current state of CPC in Adsense India. I am an Indian and I had stopped targeting Indian traffic for several years now due to the low CPCs and had instead concentrated on organic US traffic by building sites relevant to worldwide and eespecially US traffic. I had noticed a few good .in domains and got some good ideas for building a website on one of them with content that might also interest me. So, was just checking but thought of removing your confusion or rather myth about hosting at the same time.

Though it is true that hosting often effects the rankings to a slight extent but it is not a hard and fast rule. I have had dozens of sites hosted in US which ranked well in India in the past and vice versa. And some sites rank well both in India and US and nearly at the same SERP rankings. If you do not use a generic domain extension like com or net, then the country TLD affects it to some extent. But even that is not a hard and fast rule and there are many exceptions there too. The most important criteria for local rankings which I have seen and realized in all these years of being a webmaster is that Google or for that matter any SE will rank your website after checking the content of your website. If the website content makes sense (is relevant) for a particular country or region or even a city (and is unique and not duplicate content), it has a very high chance of ranking well in that local search rankings. And if the content is very good and universal, it has chances of ranking well worldwide be it google.com, google.co.uk or google.co.in or for that region any other localized search engine. So, think more about the content rather than the hosting. And just so you know, unless you own your own server here in India, most quality Indian
(except a few exceptions like Hostgator India) hosting companies host their website in US or Europe in reality as the bandwidth and hardware prices are a lot lesser there. So, do not worry so much about the hosting part. I own a dedicated server in Europe and a couple of unlimited/high end reseller hosting accounts at several top US webhosting companies and so, you can be sure that I know a bit about both website ranking and hosting effect on SEO to bust the myth.

Yeah I too have been using Adsense for my site http://arounddelhi.com and the returns were so dismal that I slowly removed most of them. Even for adwords the average cost that I pay per click is less than Rs 10.00 so that expalins the low cpc. As our clients are maily Indian so we can not concentrate on US clients for better cpc.
Thanks,
R.anand

Even i did not knew the reason behind the low CPC rate. One thing that has amazed me more that India, being the 3rd largest Internet consumer also, the condition is not too good looking. Well i don’t see any solution to it. May be in future the Indian CPC rate may increase.

As mentioned in the last paragraph of the article you need to concentrate on getting organic USA traffic. Although content is the key here but I found one superb way to target visitors from countries like UK, USA, Ireland etc. is to start a YouTube Channel for your site and brand all your videos relating to your blog. Then you can see decent money. Also try to search for private advertisers.